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Anyone here have the feeling of direct experience with space? Mine is more visual feeling, but not easy to characterize. Perhaps space gives life for me a dream like quality.

When I feel space in my waking life, it is almost fluid like. For me to describe the feeling of space is not so easy and perhaps that is dream like; that is to say the experience of space which I can feel.

I have had limited success with 'dream yoga' as taught by Norbu, but when it happens it is as if I enter a different world that seems more alive than when I am awake. There are times when it might be the so called astral, but is perhaps clearer and less emotional than the so called astral.

Your idea of 'rights' appears very fluid. Perhaps that's what happens when you have no grip on reality because you believe life is a dream ? Seems like it could be. I must be like a nightmare in your dream.

At the risk of stirring the hornets nest further. Is life your dream or theirs ? If you can't state that something is true, if you believe life is all a dream. What's true for you is then not true for them. Even if I believed your assertion, by implication you cannot believe it yourself as you have determined it is not reality.

A year or two ago I was reading Robert Moss's work, he's an author, shamanic dream path. He wrote that we'd live better if we looked at life as a dream and took our night dreams more seriously. Looking at life as a dream is a good practice imo. It means going through you day, looking at the symbolism of what happens to you, what it might represent on a mythic scale. It makes you look for signs and synchronicities. Its kind of fun. As long you don't take it too literally in which case you might be tempted to think that dream car won't really run you over. Cause dreams come and go, reality tends to be more stubborn. In my personal section I have a thread 'Life as Dream'. I should update it. Yesterday I found a penny from 1920. Actually saw it in a tip bowl, fished it out and put in 30 cents. I find lots of old coins. An old penny is lucky, 1920 is luckier, symbolizing letting good times roll, exuberance building. I've been unusually lucky the last month with stock options. A couple years ago I had a Iching reading with a practitioner here. I asked how could I become a better Trader. The answer was, honor the feminine. So I'm willing to take smaller profits. End risk earlier, keep things diverse. Today, lying by my car I found a shiny dime. In my dream reality dimes are bad luck. Perhaps just cautionary. But that is life.

I agree with Wells that the 'dream time' has been a major part of many traditions. So called reality is almost impossible to quantify given the nature of the brain and it's conditioned filtering mechanism. What one experiences is a tiny sliver of the nature of things which makes the experience one of a dream.

Nihlism isn't about human death Ralis. Nihlism is the negation of life not the reality of death. I question what you are doing continually complaining about me instead of answering the posts. It is the forum equivalent of stalking. The question here was about life being a dream. See if you can answer that.

The only matrix/dream is the one the pseudo scientist have chosen to fall into.

Scientists have/are contemplating the idea that reality is a dream slash matrix: http://www.onbeing.org/program/uncovering-codes-reality/feature/symbols-power-adinkras-and-nature-reality/1460 --------------------------------------------- Physicists at The Australian National University (ANU) have conducted John Wheeler’s delayed-choice thought experiment, which involves a moving object that is given the choice to act like a particle or a wave. Wheeler’s experiment then asks – at which point does the object decide? http://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/experiment-confirms-quantum-theory-weirdness -------------------------------------------- One of the oddest predictions of quantum theory – that a system can’t change while you’re watching it – has been confirmed in an experiment by Cornell physicists. http://phys.org/news/2015-10-zeno-effect-verifiedatoms-wont.html#jCp

Let's not get hung up on Aristotlian logic which has become some kind of bette noir for you. I cannot define that which has no existence. It's pointless to begin to try. I can define only concepts in relation to existent reality. If I'm unable to define the concept I hold, then something is wrong. It's often the case that I believe I have defined a concept only to discover at a later stage that it is entirely foggy. That's one of the things I enjoy doing-discovering what I thought I had correctly integrated and then tearing it apart like a doughnut and putting it right. I can define a dream as an altered state of consciousness. There are many. We have a plethora of alternate states of consciousness, but we should know when we are actively conscious and directly perceiving reality. If we are not, then we can't be sure of anything. Whilst this is a good defence against bad situations, it isn't permanent. We still have to get up, eat, go to the toilet, find food, mend the leaking roof, build the fire. We can avoid and evade, but we cannot put off the inevitable. It will come to you no matter how deeply you hug your pillow, squeeze shut your eyes on pull that blanket over your head. Learn to love it.

We can't really know for sure-- in order to know we would have to be "outside" of the dream. Perhaps we are all like Zhuangzi's butterfly. However, if we imagined what it would really be like if our experience as if it WERE a dream, there are some interesting implications which serves as an excellent metaphor for nonduality, rather than as myriad reified objects that arise out of an essentialist metaphysics. (Essentialism only "works" in a certain limited context-- the problem with essentialism is the conviction that such a view is the end-all and be-all of reality. It is the error of transposing empiricism (which works great in science) into the metaphysical. This generate a myriad number of problems which I can't even get into here.) But consider this: I think most people have dreamed of family, friends, co-workers, people in the past or even those basic "stock characters" -- and no matter what our interactions are with them in these dreams, none of these "other persons" within the dream are actually "other persons" at all. If your father is, for example, angry with you in a dream, that isn't really your father expressing anger -- it is yourself, the dreamer, who is angry. As a metaphor, this suggests to me that the "self" we believe exists (as an essential, reified, independent object) is actually a distortion of the unified whole-- and only through such a distortion do we make the error of thinking we can have good without bad, or beautiful without ugly, or pleasure without suffering, etc. These distortions then lead us to actions which do inevitably rebound upon us because we AREN'T separate from the whole. Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "Compensation" serves as the perfect commentary for the second chapter of the Daodejing in this respect. I think this is why stillness of the mind/body (via certain forms of meditation) is vital to "smoothing out" those distortions, so to speak. The less stillness, the more distortion, and the more distortion, the less clarity. Many of our struggles in life are really just struggles with this "self" which believes itself to be "real" -- as a reified, seperate independent being -- which is very similar to how we experience the "self" in dreams. Such meditative practices don't get one out of the unreal and into the real because there is no "outside" at all. There is only experience. Maybe Zhuangzi's point is that it doesn't really matter if reality is "real" or "just a dream" -- in the end, there is only this one experience, the one life we are now living.

@Karl, I challenge you to define exactly what phenomena are. There is no way you can given the limitations of Aristotelian logic which defines the phenomenal world as a static existence as opposed to a process/dream world.

As you are pointing out, some here get stuck on the absolute 'isness' of the phenomenal world which language can never absolutely define. Or, so called reality is a process/dream as opposed to a static black/white existence.

A dream is real for only the dreamer. Reality is real for everyone.

If I remember correctly, the 'Tibetan Book of The Dead' describes all 6 bardo states as dream like. I can't argue with that given my experience.

When we see reality as (or like) a dream at a deep level, we lessen our attachment to it. We no longer are as easily buffeted by the highs and lows. There is somewhat of a detached acceptance, not in a cold and negative way but more in the sense that we are OK with circumstances as they are and they have less power over us. Another consequence is that we feel more free, more able to change things in our lives we want to change. In dream, we can do anything - fly, change our size, duplicate ourselves, change into another animate creature or inanimate substance. When we see reality as a dream, we feel less restricted by our self-imposed restrictions and are able to make changes in our habitual patterns we would not have thought possible. This idea is at the heart of dream yoga practices. Once we develop the ability to dream lucidly, the truth behind the OP's statement becomes more clear and the nature of awareness-dream-reality takes on a different feel.

I don't find it useful to classify things as real vs. unreal. It's all just what's happening, in any given moment. A dream is a part of reality that perhaps has a different texture, different sensation. But it's still happening. It's input that you react, learn and grow from, albeit in a different context. The dream world and the waking world are one continuous reality, just different states. And all of reality is empty regardless of what's going on.

No implications follow because reality and dream are oxymorons. I know reality directly, I cannot say how it is possible to know it less or more. A table is a table, I cannot know better or less well that it is what it is. So, to say reality is like a dream is like saying a table is not a table. Same old subjectivism, different kind of example.

A dream is a dream, reality is reality. The implications are that those who think reality is a dream are confused. Go to sleep, have a dream, you know it's a dream because you wake up and say 'I just had a dream'. If you wake up and think your dream was reality and reality is a dream you can test it. The things you do in a dream-flying, falling etc- try doing this when you are awake. Try leaping into the air and see how far you get :-)

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I guess that's how all of us learn anything. Trying it our way - good advice, IMO. I applaud him. Nobody could've told me nuthin' back in the day. I knew a young Buddhist chick that I met in a campground when I was staying there several winters ago, in Santa Barbara, CA. She had decided to do just what Dream Bliss is talking about - sort of a 'Buckminster' sort of thing. She was gorgeous and from Russia - she had been a model and an actress there - but in order to lose all her baggage she shaved her head and decided to go into free-fall and travel the U.S. The world, in fact. The campground was a Thousand Trails campground that sells membership. The salesman there talked her into buying a membership so she could be 'safe' as she was traveling around the country. She bought a membership, and woke up the next morning with a terrible case of buyer's remorse. She knew this was totally contrary to everything she wanted to do, that it was the opposite of free-fall. So I went up to her rental cabin the next morning and she was in tears. She asked me if I could get her money back, that she had made a horrible mistake. I told her, no - I wouldn't get her money back from her, but I could teach her the art of wu-wei. I glanced down the hill and saw that the salesman, Martin, was coming out of his cabin. I told her that Martin may be headed this way, and if he was, for her to do set her intent on getting her money back, and do nothing to change the dynamic, and let Martin do all the talking. He walked into her cabin, told her he couldn't get the exact terms of their agreement, and handed the check back to her. I had to go into the other room and just laugh - it worked so perfectly. For some reason, Natasha and I didn't exchange numbers. I wish I knew what she's doing and where she's doing it today. What an exquisite creature she was. But it was one of those strange situations where I was put into her path for a very specific reason - and she was put into my path for an equally specific reason - to channel to me my Russian grandmother whom I had been looking for for years on Ancestry. An incredible couple days.

I had a strange snake dream recently too - my partner kasia told me that my pelvis was jumping the whole night, but I was sleeping very deeply didn't know whats happening at all, just swimming and playing with snakes in my dream I guess just releasing old tension and opening certain nadis - I don't know how you feel but I think this is nothing to worry or get excited about take care and a smooth awakening to you

After having some crazy type of astral type dream I woke up in mid pelvic spasm and my dan tien hot. Once the spasms had subsided I was simply lying in my bed with my arm lying out of the side when my fingers began to make a wave motion, hmmm I thought , lets see whats going on now , so I lay observing them . The motion then went into my hand which began to make circles, after some time this went into my arm and this too from elbow upward began to make circles. Every now and again gentle pelvic rocking would happen. After a while it subsided and I lay on my other side, not long after it started on this side in the same order but this time it ended up going all the way to my shoulder blade. I assumed it was some kind of energy pattern that needed to release itself ?

Just found Jason Stephenson's guided meditations. Some seem pretty interesting. I've turned them into mp3's and can't wait to listen to some of them. He's got some nice trippy and sleep style meditations. Like Dream Creation and Setting Intentions Before Deep Sleep.. and Open the Magic Book and Powerful Talisman titled ones. Getting into a relaxed state and taken on a visual trip can be fun.